Ms BADGER (Lyons) – Honourable Speaker, a vote will be required. I move –
That the House:
- Recognises the significant community concern expressed over AI factories in northern Tasmania and the present lack of trust between this new tech industry and community.
- Acknowledges that Tasmania could have suitable, socially accepted technology developments, done at an appropriate island scale, in consultation with the Tasmanian community.
- Notes that:
- neither the State nor Federal Governments have guardrails in place to ensure the public interest is preserved, including in local job creation, and the protection of local communities and public resources;
- there is no binding obligation for AI data facilities to provide their own renewable energy requirements;
- the Standing Committee on Government Administration A has established an inquiry into AI data centres, with Terms of Reference including the recommendation of legislative and regulatory guardrails; and
- one of the largest ever parliamentary e-petitions calling for a moratorium on AI data centres has attracted circa 10,000 signatures.
- Calls on the State Government to:
- table, by 8 September 2026:
- transparent public updates on energy negotiations, including emails, briefing papers and meeting notes, for Firmus’ Bell Bay and Wesley Vale sites; and
- details of all proposed AI data proponents working with the Office of the Coordinator General, their locations, and estimated power and water consumption.
- establish an immediate moratorium on all new AI data facilities that have not been provided a power contract, until the Standing Committee on Government Administration A’s Inquiry has been completed, and legislative and regulatory guardrails are in place.
Thank you very much. I want to start by saying an enormous congratulations to the community of Tasmania who have taken an incredible stand against the current unregulated growth of AI data centres in Tasmania. This has come as an enormous shock to a lot of members in the community to see the three centres, in particular in the north of the state, and the enormous percentage of this state’s energy that they alone are set to consume when the Tasmanian people have not yet had an opportunity to have a fair say on how they want to see AI and data centres rolled out across this state.
So, it is understandable that over 10,000 people signed a petition calling for a moratorium until guardrails are in place, because they have been seeking answers. People in this place have been seeking answers from the government for months and we simply can’t get any. Just this morning in Question Time, we’re asking really basic stuff here, like who are you talking to, how is it going? What are the energy agreements looking like for centres that have actually been approved through the council process, and we can’t get it. That is not good enough.
Yet again, we are here with another motion before the House just to try to extract basic information that the Tasmanian public have a right to know out of this government. It is absolutely shameful, the way that this government has handled the roll out of AI and data facilities in this state because let’s be very clear, they do have a role in Tasmania’s future but that is done at an appropriate island‑scale and in consultation with the Tasmanian community.
These are resource‑intensive centres and it is public resources that they are consuming. They are going in Tasmanian neighbourhoods, like at St Leonards, and yet people are not having a fair say. At Bell Bay, the George Town Council made a decision on that development application just last week. Now, before that decision was made, Ms Rosol, the Greens member for Bass, and I, did write to the Premier and the Energy minister because two of the greatest concerns that that community has is, naturally, around the energy consumption and where the water allocation, albeit less than a traditional data centre, was actually going to come from. They just wanted answers and so, we asked the Premier and the energy minister to be really clear with how those negotiations were going if no conclusion had been made. They didn’t even have the respect to reply to us. In fact all they did was make a few comments, fob it off to the GBEs, to Hydro, TasNetworks and TasWater, through the media. That is not answering adequately to the Tasmanian people who have concerns.
Now, to Firmus’ credit, they did have community consultation on that project after there were serious community uproar, but what about the people at St Leonards? What about the people at St Leonards, who didn’t even know until the development on the new centre there had actually started, what was really going on? There was even a development application alteration in July and the community can’t get answers as to what it actually means to the site. Now, they’re not outright opposing this. They just want clarity and answers. When they’re not getting it and when decisions appear to be made behind closed doors, understandably, they have concerns, and then they start asking for things like a moratorium. That is completely understandable. Where is the community consultation from the Liberals or from Firmus for the people in St Leonards and in Wesley Vale?
The DA has just dropped and the community there have serious concerns about what it’s actually going to mean now that we have councils going into caretaker periods. What does it actually mean when we have what is a very distinct type of development that councils themselves are raising concern about the processes that they do or indeed do not have when it comes to approving or declining these centres. We’ve heard it from the Launceston Council, we heard it again from the George Town Council and no doubt we will hear it from the Latrobe Council when it comes to Wesley Vale as well. The community want to know what this actually means when the council is in caretaker mode, and what difference is that going to make for them in terms of things like lodging petitions or trying to get extra meetings and briefings? It’s because of all of this that trust is simply not being built with the Tasmanian community and the future of this industry, because of the conflicting information that has come out from major proponents as well.
That’s not good enough. Tasmania can and does deserve a future that is clean, green and equitably connected. We should see a situation where if we’re seeing these centres built – at appropriate scale that is fitting with Tasmanians – that Tasmanians are seeing a very clear tangible benefit from having these centres in their backyard and that Tasmanians understand exactly what benefit they are getting from them.
We do already have in this state several small data centres and they’ve existed in their locations – you know, there’s one in the mall that’s been there for over a decade. They are small‑scale centres that that have operated in harmony and with an absolute social licence for quite some time. We can do this. We can do this the right way, but the current way that the government has undertaken is the complete wrong way.
Let’s go back to really where all of this came from in some ways, with Firmus and the announcement of the first AI factory zone – or indeed was it the first ‘AI green factory zone’, it really just depends who you ask. Let’s be really clear: Firmus have set up here for quite some couple of years now, since around 2020 their Bitcoin mining company at that point had set up in St Leonards and was about half built. That’s when the CEO Oliver Curtis’ father, Nicholas Curtis, started writing to the Tasmanian government to show them what they had on offer to seek some support. At that time, they said that the centre was half built in 2020 and they were still trying to find some key customers and clientele for their product. We know since then they’ve shifted from Bitcoin mining to the proposed AI factories. Firmus in itself, as we know, is currently seeking ASX listing, and it’s really come from the backing of Nvidia, who is the chip company that is supplying it. Just recently there was an article on them in the Australian Financial Review, talking about how Nvidia’s quarterly revenue is doubling year on year. Annual revenue should hit, in United States dollars, 400 billion this year. For context, that is roughly ten times BHP’s revenue.
It was in July 2025 that the Premier came out – this was in caretaker mode last year – and announced the creation of the world’s first AI factory zone in northern Tasmania. As a part of the media release that went out, there was a quote from Co-CEO Mr Rosenfield who said, ‘Producing these AI tokens’ – that’s the product that Firmus is going to produce – ‘in Tasmania will create a new type of green AI token – clean and powered by renewables – enabling AI to scale sustainably’. The question is, what really is a ‘green AI token’ that is being produced in these centres? That’s a question that Tasmanians want to know. Well, if you go to Nvidia’s website and have a look, given that they’re the chip supplier for Firmus and really where the financial backing is coming from, they describe it on their website, the project that they’re doing, they say it’s powered ‘entirely by firmed hydroelectric, enabled by Tasmania’s green AI factory zone, a government backed initiative to unlock energy pathways for next generation digital infrastructure’. That raises a lot of questions.
First of all, what is an ‘AI factory zone’? I’ve said this before in this place and I’ve asked the Premier, indeed, when the caretaker convention committee was having hearings, we said to the Premier, what is an AI factory zone? And his response was: ‘Let’s not be pedantic about words’.
Actually, let’s be pedantic about words because we’ve gone from an AI factory zone to a green AI factory zone to create green AI tokens for Firmus, which is their business point that’s different from any other AI factory because it’s green, so what is it? They actually describe it as ‘the backing and support of Tasmania as a state’. It is the reputable endorsement that this Premier decided upon himself to give Firmus without any consultation with the Tasmanian community, our state, our state’s reputation is what is behind this private company seeking ASX listing. That is absolutely shameful.
As the motion notes and as we’ve already spoken about today, there are no binding obligations or guardrails on data centres, not just here in Tasmania but indeed across the nation. We know that there are statements of expectations and guidelines that have come nationally and we know that there are intentions nationally to implement various pieces of legislation, but already here when we have the St Leonards Firmus site, the one at Bell Bay and the DA for Wesley Vale heading through and the chunk of energy that those three alone in this state are going to be consuming, it is not good enough that there is nothing binding in place to actually set out what the obligations are going to be. Simply having expectations is not good enough because that means that we entirely are being asked as a state to trust proponents of data centres to go by their own policies and Tasmanians are asking us why would we trust Firmus, for example, as the biggest one coming in.
This is a company that accidentally put on their website disclosure of supposedly talking to Tasmanian Irrigation for water at Wesley Vale. This is a company that has been condemned by the UN for the misuse of its logo, a fact that was passed in a motion unanimously in this place. This is a company that has routinely changed its power efficiency estimates. Now that is important because if that is not correct, this company is going to end up using more water and more energy than what has been projected and on the energy front that is already enormous, that is not something that Tasmania can afford to get wrong. This is a company that very clearly wrote in its own job advertisement.
Firmus runs on narrative as much as it runs on engineering and you want Tasmanians to trust them.
There is an inquiry underway. The Standing Committee on Government Administration A specifically into AI data centres with the terms of reference looking into the recommendation of legislative regulatory guardrails, among many other things.
That’s a really good start and I want to congratulate everybody across the board who’s been part of that because it has been so welcomed by Tasmanians that that step has been taken but really it’s not up to getting to the point of an inquiry. That should have all been put in place years ago. We’ve been talking, the Office of the Co-Ordinator General (OCG) has been part of this since 2018. We have Firmus talking to the government since 2020 about what they’re planning to do and move forward. That’s plenty of time to assess the growth and how we can actually implement it in a way that best fits Tasmania.
This motion is calling on a series of updates and information from the government so that we can provide it to Tasmanians and help them understand what’s actually happening; to help us as decision makers, as scrutineers of the government, what’s actually happening as well. And they’re all really, really basic things. It’s really just following up from what we asked in Question Time. It’s following up from the letters that multiple people across this Chamber have been writing to the government about for some months now.
We’ve asked and it’s by 8 September which would provide us the next sitting weeks to actually have this information and have a look at it. The precedent for providing this in such a way that is fair and transparent has been set by the previous motion that was passed unanimously by this House. And that’s important. It is important that the community understands where energy negotiations are up to for Firmus’ Bell Bay site that has already been approved and Wesley Vale that is before the Council.
It is important that we understand who the Office of the Coordinator-General is working with, or if we can’t know who, how many people? Where are their sites actually being proposed? We know the Office of the Coordinator-General was helping Firmus look at the specific sites as to where they could put up a centre, so where else are they suggesting to these other proponents that they could set up shop in Tasmania, and what scale are they looking at? How much more energy are we looking at allocating to these centres?
I understand that there will be some amendments put forward in addition to the asks under 4A to look at‑ I’m just going to speak to them now to save time‑ to really look at what the requirements might be that the Tasmanian Government are asking in regards to energy and if, as has been previously circulated, I can indicate that we will be supporting them and I want to thank the Labor Party for working collaboratively on those with the expectation that your two amendments will be moved separately, because we would sincerely like to be able to support the first one.
I think it is a series of really clear information around exactly how the expectations that this government say that they’re going to put on data centres in relation to producing extra renewable energy in Tasmania. Well, how does that look? What kind of renewable energy? Will you or won’t you be accepting money from, as Firmus they’ve proposed, giving funding to Hydro? Then how are you going to oblige Hydro to ensure that that money goes to a new project, or are you going to be accepting that as payments to your costly Marinus project? How exactly is it going to work and how is it going to be binding and not just more expectations that relies on Tasmanians to trust the government and trust the proponents of these centres because, frankly, we’re not off to a start where we’re actually able to do that.
The final point in this motion is really clear and it has come from the Tasmanian community resoundingly in the petition and that is calling for an immediate moratorium on all new AI data facilities until we have the guardrails in place that are currently being looked at. This is so important because really the horse is well and truly bolted on this one. It is too late. We’ve got three centres here that have, really, been approved without any adequate ability for scrutiny because we simply haven’t had the information available to us, that is despite the best efforts of members in this place and members in the community trying to get that information. We have got processes underway to get those regulations and guardrails in place, but they’re going to take some time and it’s simply not enough to appease the concerns of the community.
Again, I want to thank the community for everything they have done and those who have absolutely never campaigned against anything in their life, who do not want to be opposing this, who have had to learn what it actually is like to campaign. They’ve started making banners and how to write to politicians and how to make petitions that conform with the standing orders, with councils. That is an enormous amount of work for people to learn in what is, really, just a matter of months.
So, I want to congratulate everyone that, in whatever form they have taken, to make their voice heard on AI and data facilities in Tasmania and just say well done and good on you for getting involved in what is a really important democratic issue. On what, if we get this wrong, will be one of the greatest intergenerational burdens that we leave on this state, which is why it is so important that we get this right and why a pause should be considered.
